California Special Election & Propositions - May 19, 2009

[Andrew]

The point of (that part of) Prop 13 was to avoid huge sudden raises in property tax to homeowners. Why it's also applied to commercial property is beyond me.

[Alex]

Originally Posted by Andrew

The point of (that part of) Prop 13 was to avoid huge sudden raises in property tax to homeowners. Why it's also applied to commercial property is beyond me.

Because the logic of the idea, that people were being forced to sell and move away because they could no longer afford the property tax on their home applies just as well to businesses being forced to relocate because of increases on their property taxes (and when a big business does it they're likely to move out of state taking a lot of other revenues as well and when a small business does it they may very well just close shop altogether).

I'm not strongly opposed to the driving idea beyond the tax rollback and cap, though I think it was done in too brute-force a way. By far the most damaging part, in my view, is the 2/3 super majority.

Saying "you can't have these taxes, and you also can't have any other taxes, but everything else is going to make it incredibly easy to spend" is just a bad combination. Especially since state Republicans are no more anti-spending than state Democrats, they just don't agree on which things to spend money on and the general public is also allowed to directly spend money.